An Eye (and Nose) Opener

I like to complain about my house. Keeping it up requires more hours in a day than I choose to devote to it, so it is frequently messy. Dishes and laundry tend to pile up more than they should, not to mention overflowing garbage cans, school projects, toys, and dog hair. And so I spend at least several minutes a day complaining to somebody about something that is wrong in the housekeeping department around here.

Today I was not complaining. Today I saw squallor. I smelled it too. A friend recently purchased some four-plexes in a run down area of Logan as an investment property. He got a great deal on them, knowing they were in need of some fixing up, but because some of them were occupied at the time he bought them, he didn't see inside all of the units. He recently unloaded the dead beat renters, and now most all of the units are vacant. This afternoon, he took us on a tour of them.

Holy crap.

I use that term as a descriptive phrase.

There really aren't words to adequately describe what we saw. Pillows of mold growing out of and around old food in the fridge. Piles of animal crap left on the carpet. And mounds and mounds and mounds of trash. The smell was unreal. And in the worst unit, they had a baby living there. We were headed out to lunch afterward, but we lost our appetite.

So we headed for home, and as we walked in the door, our house seemed to gleam! It wasn't any cleaner than I had left it; in fact, the kids had semi-trashed the place while we were gone. But it didn't smell. We could walk around and not worry about what we might be stepping in, and the food sitting on the counter was left out from today's lunch, not last month's dinner.

It was so nice to come home. I'm not going to complain so much. Our housekeeping department is doing okay.